Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Dayna Hanson at On the Boards – December 2

At a time when Americans find themselves standing by watching their democratic institutions erode and their country rapidly devolve into a bloated, dying empire, the impulse to create a work of art that returns to our nation&rsquo;s struggle for independence to gain insight and inspiration makes tremendous sense. Whatever we are faced with as a people, chances are our revolutionary ancestors had as much if not more to contend with.

Seattle choreographer Dayna Hanson returns to the War of Independence in Gloria&rsquo;s Cause, a work she calls a &ldquo;dance-driven, documentary-infused rock musical.&rdquo; After a residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and much research into Indian treaties, troop morale and women soldiers from history books as well as George Washington&rsquo;s papers and other original source material, Hanson offers up an eighty minute performance of dance, dialogue, live music and song.

But if audiences were hoping for a faith-shattering, revisionist take on American history or expected to be challenged and entertained by a compelling, fully-realized work of art, they went home empty-handed. Gloria&rsquo;s Cause was the most insipid and disappointing performance work Seattle has seen for several seasons.

It is difficult to understand Hanson&rsquo;s take on her subject, as she and her cohorts appear to flee from it whenever it surfaces on stage. The whole production is less a revolution in understanding than it is a rout from it. Whatever your view on American history, it must be taken seriously, especially if you&rsquo;re a satirist. Hanson&rsquo;s unrelenting glibness and scattered approach to events and persons prevents her from ever engaging it emotionally or intellectually. From start to finish, Gloria&rsquo;s Cause is an inert, flaccid work of art that lacks any tone, tension, structure or rhythm.

While billed as a dance, Gloria&rsquo;s Cause relies primarily on dialogue and spoken word to anchor itself to its purported subject. At the outset, the forgotten role of women comes into play as veteran Seattle dancer/performer Wade Madsen reads a solemn letter from Paul Revere, who writes to George Washington on behalf of a woman who had taken up the cause of the independence. Madsen&rsquo;s reading is pitch-perfect and we are left contemplating the countless other brave women whose stories will never be told. It is the best moment of the show by far and the only one that leaves us with any sense of history&rsquo;s failure to tell our collective story accurately. Such poignancy and clarity never again return to the stage.

The matter of the Indians is addresses in a raucous mock-corporate board meeting/treaty negotiation, presumably at the outset of the French and Indian War. Here, in the fast-clipped but oddly out-of-sync verbal sparing, Hanson&rsquo;s library research gives way to a kind of arch silliness. Benjamin Franklin, in the form of a plastic doll, emerges from the proceedings and is seen projected on the wall as Hanson moves about the stage animating his tiny frame and giving him a suitably diminutive voice. Is she undercutting conventional notions that such moments produced heroes? Does she believe the historical event itself was simply a joke? It&rsquo;s possible, but it felt more as if she had simply elected not to address the scene&rsquo;s significance and Gloria’s Cause continued on in this vein from here on out. The founding fathers&rsquo; debate over the Bill of Rights morphs, for no reason in particular, into a superfluous and forgettable hard rock musical number. Later Madsen appears as an old, drunken George Washington on a Jerry Springer-like show to refute charges of cruelty and incompetence from an ex-soldier. The scenes are played for laughs but the writing &ndash; both thin and lost somewhere on the comedy spectrum between Samuel Beckett and the Firesign Theater &ndash; leaves the performers struggling. After occasionally promising starts, the gags fall flat, scenes evaporate and things side back into stasis.

Perhaps these shortcomings wouldn’t matter so much if the music rose to the occasion. The instrumental transitions were barely discernable from anything that might be deemed a musical number, and none of it proved memorable. One major problem with Gloria&rsquo;s Cause was that it overlooked America&rsquo;s rich musical traditions when telling America&rsquo;s biggest story. With so much blood, exploitation, betrayal and destruction in its wake, our nation&rsquo;s history has left its survivors with the blues as the defining mode of expression. Unfortunately, there was no place for it in a production that had little interest in human emotion or experience. On the rare occasion when the music coalesced around a breaking situation, the best we could hope for was a momentary School House Rock vibe that faded as quickly as it came. Even if sustained, it would not have been suitable for any but the most superficial retelling of American history. If Hanson and her crew were actually striving for a Brechtian subversiveness, they would have been better off embracing some Broadway or rock opera conventions, at least as a point of departure.&nbsp;

The choreography, however, was the weakest element of Gloria&rsquo;s Cause. Jim Kent and Jessie Smith &ndash; two of Seattle&rsquo;s best modern dancers &ndash; would often bring things into focus on stage with sharp, expressive movement. But without anything larger to anchor themselves to, they were left to sputter and stall. The charismatic Madsen himself, always a force to be reckoned with, has far too little to do. Peggy Piacenza, who was an integral part of Pat Graney&rsquo;s recent Faith Tryptic revival at On the Boards last month, is for a time cast in the part of the eagle; a manifestation (presumably) of our country&rsquo;s insecurity and schizophrenia. After a rambling, self-conscious monologue spoken into a wireless microphone, she proceeds to do a flailing, wounded solo in an eagle mask that makes her resemble a chicken more than a bird of prey. The premise is a good one, but the movement did not meet its challenge and the scene became just another tedious interlude among many.

There is a creeping sense throughout its eighty minutes that Gloria&rsquo;s Cause is nothing more than a series of preliminary sketches created at group improv sessions, strung together but never fully developed or connected. Whatever the case, Hanson and company have not been able to discover the work&rsquo;s pulse and their failure results in a very long evening.

It may be difficult to create an evening-length musical/performance work that captures both the sweep of history and the present moment, but it has been done. Last April, the famed Seattle musical septet &ldquo;Awesome&rdquo; presented West &ndash; described accurately by the band as &ldquo;a highly visual song cycle” that concerns “abstracted myths of the West” &ndash; on this same stage at On the Boards. Inspired by the journey of Lewis and Clark and our nation&rsquo;s westward expansion it combined sublime comedy, elaborate stagecraft, carefully thought-out blocking and ingenious theatrical flourishes with complex musical arrangements and soaring vocal harmonies to create a real sense of an age-old concept that still manifests a people&rsquo;s hopes and dreams today. Directed by Matt Richter with set design by the incomparable Jennifer Zeyl, it was everything that Gloria&rsquo;s Cause was not. Though both were non-narrative attempts to access the essence of a powerful idea deeply rooted in our history, this investigation of the American Revolution was, by comparison, more a muddle than a musical meditation on America’s tragic beauty.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.